Eyes focus on repetition at ‘Measured Variations’

Both Richard Garrison and Tina Seligman, the two artists in “Measured Variations” at the Saratoga Arts Center Gallery, employ the duplicity of designs to create divergent works that surprise.

Using a Spirograph, Garrison plays with thousands of circles, spinning shapes into a multitude of possibilities. In the Delmar artist’s “Spirograph No. 22,” regimented lines are transformed from mere geometry to threads of fabric in a rug with floral arrangements, or an intricate network of catacombs.

Seligman finds regularity but also improvisation in musical rhythms. Her collages use natural forms from photographs embellished with paints, and transforms them into mesmerizing patterns full of movement based on Allegro and Andante. From a distance, the New York City artist’s pictures look like sonograms or satellite photos.

Both artists repeat simple forms into more complex designs, presenting a tantalizing exercise on how the mind interprets hundreds of tiny bits of data at any given time. Both — Seligman in particular — trigger a contemplative mood.
Garrison has gained notice for his digital pictures on paper that distill parking lot lines, color patterns of drive-through restaurants and big-box stores into bar graphs, mimicking the subliminal experience of shopping and buying. His frames illustrate how calculating and planned businesses are when developing customer loyalty. It’s an art form in itself.

To Garrison, the Spirograph is a form of “doodling.” He returned to the instrument in 2002 as he first explored his series on the uniformity of suburbia. Direct and reductive, this work provides a valuable primer to his more minimalist excursions into the blandness of our surroundings.

Volunteers sought for ‘Leaf Factory’

About 10,000 leaves made of acetate paper and paint gel will be assembled by dozens of volunteers in a temporary “Leaf Factory,” which begins Saturday until Troy Night Out on Oct. 30 at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy.

During shifts throughout each day — slots are still available (no experience necessary) — volunteers will glue, trace, cut and digitally manipulate images onto paper that will resemble something like stained glass. Eventually, the factory’s product will hang as a canopy in Phase 2 of the endeavor.

Once the leaves are assembled, conceptual sculptor and performance artist Noah Fischer will combine them with old CDs, cassette tapes, plywood boxes and branches to create the site-specific installation “Electrical Forest.” Occupying the main gallery on the first floor in November, the exhibit will be dominated by monstrous trees “with a lots of things going on — sound, light,” said Lauren Wolk, the independent curator hired by the center to carry out the ambitious project.

The Brooklyn-based Fischer uses disposable objects, videos and sound to create complete environments that engulf the viewer in atmosphere. In the installation “Pop Ark,” Fischer simulates life after global warming. Discarded technology, gears, pulleys and a jukebox are combined with a domed community driven my YouTube and blogs rambling about climate change.

Wolk chose the forest idea for its commentary on the relationship between industry and nature, refuse and recycling, and obsolete design and innovation. Troy’s industrial legacy and its continued efforts to adapt in the 21st century make it a perfect location for the project, she said.

Tim Kane is a freelance writer from Albany and a frequent contributor to the Times Union.